> "freed the world from ever depending on paper maps or confusing directions from relatives again"

It's entirely plausible that GPS, or any equivalent, will die before minkind does. Mad Max, seen it?

In addition to isight's blog
there's an article in Wired

Apparently the Rhode Island State Police posted a photo and plausible statement:

https://www.facebook.com/Rhode...

The post says the canine is "trained to detect electronic devices".

That does not look as bogus a claim as training specifically for storage media: the chemicals used in the soldering, cleaning, and IC packaging conceivably could have a detectable smell.

The whole thing is unsubstantiated FUD. I base my judgment on the slides at
https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/us-13-Stamos-The-Factoring-Dead.pdf

The whole argument boils down to:
a) there has recently been huge progress [*] in solving the Discrete Log Problem over fields of small characteristic;
b) progress in solving the DLP have historically implied progress in factorization, and vice versa;
c) factorization breaks RSA, and solving the DLP breaks DSA;
d) thus RSA and DSA are dead, move to ECDSA.

The fallacy of it is that in b) and c), the DLP is exclusively over fields of huge characteristics (thousands of bits), making the algorithms in a) powerless. The slides do not hint at the faintest research lead towards moving to huge characteristics. Best argument is that "renewed interest could result in further improvements".

One the positive side, the author is honest: "I’m not a mathematician, I just play one on stage".

    François Grieu

[*] See e.g. this recent paper and its references
Razvan Barbulescu, Pierrick Gaudry, Antoine Joux, Emmanuel Thomé: A quasi-polynomial algorithm for discrete logarithm in finite fields of small characteristic
http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/83/54/46/PDF/quasi.pdf

From the article: "The top performing redox electrolyte (..) yielded output powers of 522 mW per square meter."

Seems that to get the 1 GW power of a nuclear reactor, one would need the active surface of a square of 43 kilometer side coated with that Cobalt stuff.

The original report says about the last vulnerability discussed (but not disclosed)

I like the tone: they stop short of stating this is a deliberate backdoor of the worst kind, but give extremely convincing argument that it is one.

The taken-down images, and the promotional video around 2:53
http://pages.ciphercloud.com/AnyAppfiveminutesdemo.html?aliId=1
make it clear that in these promotional materials, identical plaintext leads to identical ciphertext.

Ciphercould's DMCA takedown notice
http://meta.crypto.stackexchange.com/a/258/555
rebuts that as wrong ("Ciphercloud's product is not deterministic"), with a key point at the beginning of page 3:
"[detractor] implies that what was perceived from a public demo is Ciphercould's product offering".

Ciphercould's position is: you misjudged us from what we have shown, which is not the real thing.

If trading funny money and a bare-bones web interface is OK, there is Foresight Exchange (aka Ideosphere) which has worked almost flawlessly since 1994.
http://www.ideosphere.com/

If this computer can decide to reboot itself, it must have now reached self-awareness!

My favorite is the Apple ][ disk controller, most notably the read synchronization and decoding achieving 5, then ultimately 6 useful data bits per raw 8 bits, using little discrete logic and a small (P)ROM.

Recently had this situation.

Nirsoft's free "SearchMyFiles" http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html has a straightforward Find Duplicates mode which helped a lot. It is easy (the most "complex" is designating the base locations for searches as e.g. K:\;L:\;P:\;Q:\), fast, never crashed on me, and had only cosmetic issues ("del" key not working). I recommend running it with administrative privileges so that it does not miss files.

Link please?

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2046756

"..we describe a practical attack on XML Encryption, which allows to decrypt a ciphertext by sending related ciphertexts to a Web Service and evaluating the server response. We show that an adversary can decrypt a ciphertext by performing only 14 requests per plaintext byte on average."

Impressive!

I now see your point: a CAs does not guarantee against MITM in the same way a safe does not guarantee against robbery.

Can you please explain, preferably with a link to a reference?
Common wisdom is that good CA + SSL should protect against MITM, including if the DNS service is comprimized.